It’s the afternoon before Donald Trump’s inauguration and just a few days after the death of enigmatic Nigerian musician William Onyeabor, and Ahmed Gallab is hunkered down in a Brooklyn practice space. Gallab—who performs under the name Sinkane and played drums with the band Yeasayer for a stretch—has traveled the world working with giants like Damon Albarn and Pharoah Sanders, leading a band playing Onyeabor’s music.

That project gave Gallab a sense of something “larger than life” in the music. “I wanted to rein that energy back into my music,” he says. With Sinkane, which is now a six-piece band, Gallab makes big, jubilant dance-ready music that celebrates optimism and endurance, embracing positivity as a force to harness and channel into the world.

Gallab, 33, grew up in Utah and Ohio, but he was born in London to parents who had been exiled from Sudan during the country’s political upheaval. “I know the impact of a corrupt government because it’s happened to me,” he says. Gallab sees music as the creative expression of hope, agency and identity, even for the uprooted. “If I don’t take control, I might never make it home,” goes the refrain on the slinky “Passenger,” from Sinkane’s new album, Life & Livin’ It.

Gallab writes about identity and finding one’s place, things he struggled with in his youth. “It’s a call to people who are similar to me,” he says. “For us displaced people, there is a home comprised of all our collective homes.”

The record is driven by his familiarity with global dance music, soul, reggae, Tropicália and suave post-punk-inflected pop. Gallab says Sudanese music seeped into his sensibility during his childhood, even if he didn’t like the stuff then.

“As a young, rebellious kid, that was the last thing I wanted to hear,” he says. But it became “ingrained” in his psyche. “U’Huh” is a feel-good groove—with ecstatic horn stabs—that seems made for the moment. “We’re all gonna be all right,” repeats one line, in defiant, uplifting confidence. As Gallab says, “I feel like a lot of people need a positive, bright and lively energy in these trying times.”